PORTSMOUTH — No one would have blamed the Portsmouth High School football team for taking a knee.

Up by six points in with 38 seconds to go in the first half of their annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Bowl against Dover on Thursday, the Clippers took over on their own 30 yard line following a Green Wave punt. Portsmouth was five days removed from winning its second straight Division III championship and were nine starters. A number of those who took the field were hoping to avoid injury and be healthy for winter sports.

Call it a half and head to the locker room, right? Not Portsmouth on Thursday. The Clippers twice threw deep with the hope of building a bigger lead at the break. Although the drive did not end in a score, it showed that Portsmouth had come to play.

“Every single time we run the two-minute offense, it’s always to score,” Portsmouth quarterback Donovan Phanor said. “Never a field goal, never something like that. It’s always a touchdown. We’re going for points.”

The Clippers went on to win 27-14 at Tom Daubney Field and snapped Dover’s three-game winning streak in the teams’ seven-year Thanksgiving series, which ended with Thursday morning’s contest.

“Coming into the game it kind of felt like we were just going to go through the motions,” Portsmouth sophomore running back Mikel Toar said. “But first play of the game, we turned it on. We definitely wanted to win and end the season on a good note.”

That they did. After an exhausting 54-27 win over Goffstown in the D-III championship game last Saturday, Portsmouth finished the season 10-2 with wins over a pair of teams (Londonderry and Dover) in larger-school divisions.

Portsmouth coach Bill Murphy said it was his offensive coaches’ decision not to take a knee to end the first half.

“I think they had the mind set that we wanted to win this game,” Murphy said. “We wanted to prove that we were a good football team. We had an opportunity to get some points and they rolled the dice.”

Portsmouth’s effort on Thursday was in stark contrast to how it performed in the same game one year earlier. On that day, both teams were coming off championship-game experiences. Dover, which had lost at Bishop Guertin in the D-II final, stormed back from a 14-6 halftime deficit to win 41-21.

“I’ll tell you what, it would have been sour not to win this game,” Phanor said. “The championship game was a great game and having come here and get beat by Dover, it wouldn’t have been good.”

Dover, which missed the playoffs and hence had more than two weeks to focus solely on Portsmouth, finished the season at 3-8.

The Green Wave struggled all morning to find any type of offensive groove. A 72-yard pass from Derek Stegman to Jarrett Hudson set up a 9-yard touchdown run by Kyle Seawards which cut Portsmouth’s lead to 21-14 early in the fourth quarter. A Seawards interception on Portsmouth’s next drive gave Dover some hope for a late-game comeback, but the Green Wave quickly turned the ball back over to the Clippers with a fumble four plays later.

After the game, Dover coach Ken Osbon had high praise for Portsmouth defensive lineman Ricky Holt, who had three sacks and a key deflection that led to a Clipper interception and touchdown that shut the door on the Green Wave.

“Today we couldn’t handle their defensive front,” Osbon said. “Ricky Holt’s a player. We knew about him, we had a scheme against him and our kids just physically weren’t able to handle him.”